Realism

First published Mon Jul 8, 2002; substantive revision Thu Oct 2, 2014

The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises with
respect to a large number of subject matters, including ethics,
aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and
the everyday world of macroscopic material objects and their
properties. Although it would be possible to accept (or reject)
realism across the board, it is more common for philosophers to be
selectively realist or non-realist about various topics: thus it would
be perfectly possible to be a realist about the everyday world of
macroscopic objects and their properties, but a non-realist about
aesthetic and moral value. In addition, it is misleading to think that
there is a straightforward and clear-cut choice between being a
realist and a non-realist about a particular subject matter. It is
rather the case that one can be more-or-less realist about a
particular subject matter. Also, there are many different forms that
realism and non-realism can take.

The question of the nature and plausibility of realism is so
controversial that no brief account of it will satisfy all those with
a stake in the debates between realists and non-realists. This article
offers a broad brush characterisation of realism, and then fills out
some of the detail by looking at a few canonical examples of
opposition to realism. The discussion of forms of opposition to
realism is far from exhaustive and is designed only to illustrate a
few paradigm examples of the form such opposition can take.

There are two general aspects to realism, illustrated by looking at
realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their
properties. First, there is a claim about existence. Tables,
rocks, the moon, and so on, all exist, as do the following facts: the
table's being square, the rock's being made of granite, and the moon's
being spherical and yellow. The second aspect of realism about the
everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties concerns
independence. The fact that the moon exists and is spherical
is independent of anything anyone happens to say or think about the
matter. Likewise, although there is a clear sense in which the table's
being square is dependent on us (it was designed and constructed by
human beings after all), this is not the type of dependence that the
realist wishes to deny. The realist wishes to claim that apart from
the mundane sort of empirical dependence of objects and their
properties familiar to us from everyday life, there is no
further (philosophically interesting) sense in which everyday
objects and their properties can be said to be dependent on anyone's
linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, or whatever.

In general, where the distinctive objects of a subject-matter are
a, b, c, … , and the distinctive
properties are F-ness, G-ness,
H-ness and so on, realism about that subject matter
will typically take the form of a claim like the following:

Generic Realism: a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact
that they exist and have properties such as F-ness,
G-ness, and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical
dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life)
independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual
schemes, and so on.

Non-realism can take many forms, depending on whether or not it is
the existence or independence dimension of realism that is questioned
or rejected. The forms of non-realism can vary dramatically from
subject-matter to subject-matter, but error-theories, non-cognitivism,
instrumentalism, nominalism, certain styles of reductionism, and
eliminativism typically reject realism by rejecting the existence
dimension, while idealism, subjectivism, and anti-realism typically
concede the existence dimension but reject the independence dimension.
Philosophers who subscribe to quietism deny that there can be such a
thing as substantial metaphysical debate between realists and their
non-realist opponents (because they either deny that there are
substantial questions about existence or deny that there are
substantial questions about independence).

Three preliminary comments are needed. Firstly, there has been a
great deal of debate in recent philosophy about the relationship
between realism, construed as a metaphysical doctrine, and doctrines
in the theory of meaning and philosophy of language concerning the
nature of truth and its role in accounts of linguistic understanding
(see Dummett 1978 and Devitt 1991a for radically different views on
the issue). Independent of the issue about the relationship between
metaphysics and the theory of meaning, the well-known disquotational
properties of the truth-predicate allow claims about objects,
properties, and facts to be framed as claims about the truth of
sentences. Since:

(1) ‘The moon is spherical’ is true if and only if the
moon is spherical,

the claim that the moon exists and is spherical independently of
anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices and conceptual schemes, can be
framed as the claim that the sentences ‘The moon exists’
and ‘The moon is spherical’ are true independently of
anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes and so
on. As Devitt points out (1991b: 46) availing oneself of this way of
talking does not entail that one sees the metaphysical issue of
realism as ‘really’ a semantic issue about the nature of
truth (if it did, any question about any subject matter would turn out
to be ‘really’ a semantic issue).

Secondly, although in introducing the notion of realism above mention
is made of objects, properties, and facts, no theoretical weight is
attached to the notion of a ‘fact’, or the notions of
‘object’ and ‘property’. To say that it is a
fact that the moon is spherical is just to say that the object, the
moon, instantiates the property of being spherical, which is just to
say that the moon is spherical. There are substantial metaphysical
issues about the nature of facts, objects, and properties, and the
relationships between them (see Mellor and Oliver 1997 and Lowe 2002,
part IV), but these are not of concern here.

Thirdly, as stated above, Generic Realism about the mental or the
intentional would strictly speaking appear to be ruled out ab
initio, since clearly Jones' believing that Cardiff is in Wales
is not independent of facts about belief: trivially, it is dependent
on the fact that Jones believes that Cardiff is in Wales. However,
such trivial dependencies are not what are at issue in debates between
realists and non-realists about the mental and the intentional. A
non-realist who objected to the independence dimension of realism
about the mental would claim that Jones' believing that Cardiff is in
Wales depends in some non-trivial sense on facts about
beliefs, etc.

There are at least two distinct ways in which a non-realist can
reject the existence dimension of realism about a particular subject
matter. The first of these rejects the existence dimension by
rejecting the claim that the distinctive objects of that
subject-matter exist, while the second admits that those objects exist
but denies that they instantiate any of the properties distinctive of
that subject-matter. Non-realism of the first kind can be illustrated
via Hartry Field's error-theoretic account of arithmetic, and
non-realism of the second kind via J.L. Mackie's error-theoretic
account of morals. This will show how realism about a subject-matter
can be questioned on both epistemological and metaphysical
grounds.

According to a platonist about arithmetic, the truth of the
sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails the existence of an
abstract object, the number 7. This object is abstract
because it has no spatial or temporal location, and is causally
inert. A platonic realist about arithmetic will say that the
number 7 exists and instantiates the property of being prime
independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual
schemes, and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence
claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects,
so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false
(hence the name ‘error-theory’). Platonists divide on
their account of the epistemology of arithmetic: some claim that our
knowledge of arithmetical fact proceeds by way of some
quasi-perceptual encounter with the abstract realm (Gödel 1983),
while others have attempted to resuscitate a qualified form of Frege's
logicist project of grounding knowledge of arithmetical fact
in knowledge of logic (Wright 1983, Hale 1987, Hale and Wright
2001).

The main arguments against platonic realism turn on the idea that the
platonist position precludes a satisfactory epistemology of
arithmetic. For the classic exposition of the doubt that platonism can
square its claims to accommodate knowledge of arithmetical truth with
its conception of the subject matter of arithmetic as causally inert,
see Benacerraf (1973). Benacerraf argued that platonism faces
difficulties in squaring its conception of the subject-matter of
arithmetic with a general causal constraint on knowledge (roughly,
that a subject can be said to know that P only if she stands
in some causal relation to the subject matter of P). In
response, platonists have attacked the idea that a plausible causal
constraint on ascriptions of knowledge can be formulated (Wright 1983
Ch.2, Hale 1987 Ch.4). In response, Hartry Field, on the side of the
anti-platonists, has developed a new variant of Benacerraf's
epistemological challenge which does not depend for its force on
maintaining a generalised causal constraint on ascriptions of
knowledge. Rather, Field's new epistemological challenge to platonism
arises from his reasonable observation that ‘we should view with
suspicion any claim to know facts about a certain domain if we believe
it impossible to explain the reliability of our beliefs about that
domain’ (Field 1989: 232–3). Field's challenge to the platonist
is to offer an account of what such a platonist should regard as a
datum—i.e. that when ‘p’ is replaced by a
mathematical sentence, the schema (2) holds in most instances:

(2) If mathematicians accept ‘p’ then p.
(1989: 230)

Field's point is not simply, echoing Benacerraf, that no causal
account of reliability will be available to the platonist, and
therefore to the platonic realist. Rather, Field conceives what is
potentially a far more powerful challenge to platonic realism when he
suggests that not only has the platonic realist no recourse to any
explanation of reliability that is causal in character, but that she
has no recourse to any explanation that is non-causal in character
either. He writes:

(T)here seems prima facie to be a difficulty in principle in
explaining the regularity. The problem arises in part from the fact
that mathematical entities as the [platonic realist] conceives them,
do not causally interact with mathematicians, or indeed with anything
else. This means we cannot explain the mathematicians beliefs and
utterances on the basis of the mathematical facts being causally
involved in the production of those beliefs and utterances; or on the
basis of the beliefs or utterances causally producing the mathematical
facts; or on the basis of some common cause producing both. Perhaps
then some sort of non-causal explanation of the correlation is
possible? Perhaps; but it is very hard to see what this supposed
non-causal explanation could be. Recall that on the usual platonist
picture [i.e. platonic realism], mathematical objects are supposed to
be mind- and language-independent; they are supposed to bear no
spatiotemporal relations to anything, etc. The problem is that the
claims that the [platonic realist] makes about mathematical objects
appears to rule out any reasonable strategy for explaining the
systematic correlation in question. (1989: 230–1)

This suggests the following dilemma for the platonic realist:

Platonic realism is committed to the existence of acausal objects
and to the claim that these objects, and facts about them, are
independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual
schemes, and so on (in short to the claim that these objects, and
facts about them, are language- and mind-independent).

Any causal explanation of reliability is incompatible with the
acausality of mathematical objects.

Any non-causal explanation of reliability is incompatible with
the language- and mind-independence of mathematical objects.

Any explanation of reliability must be causal or
non-causal.

There is no explanation of reliability that is compatible with
both the acausality and language- and mind-independence of
mathematical objects.

Therefore,

There is no explanation of reliability that is compatible with
platonic realism.

Whether there is a version of platonic realism with the resources to
see off Field's epistemological challenge is very much a live issue
(see Hale 1994, Divers and Miller 1999. For replies to Divers and
Miller see Sosa 2002, Shapiro 2007 and Piazza 2009).

What does Field propose as an alternative to platonic realism in
arithmetic? Field's answer (1980, 1989) is that although mathematical
sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false, the utility of
mathematical theories can be explained otherwise than in terms of
their truth. For Field, the utility of mathematical theories resides
not in their truth but in their conservativeness, where a
mathematical theory S is conservative if and only if for any
nominalistically respectable statement A (i.e. a statement
whose truth does not imply the existence of abstract objects) and any
body of such statements N, A is not a consequence of
the conjunction of N and S unless A is a
consequence of N alone (Field 1989: 125). In short,
mathematics is useful, not because it allows you to derive conclusions
that you couldn't have derived from nominalistically respectable
premises alone, but rather because it makes the derivation of those
(nominalistically respectable) conclusions easier than it might
otherwise have been. Whether or not Field's particular brand of
error-theory about arithmetic is plausible is a topic of some debate,
which unfortunately cannot be pursued further here (see Hale and
Wright 2001).

According to Field's error-theory of arithmetic, the objects
distinctive of arithmetic do not exist, and it is this which leads to
the rejection of the existence dimension of arithmetical realism, at
least as platonistically conceived (for a non-platonistic view of
arithmetic which is at least potentially realist, see Benacerraf 1965;
for incisive discussion, see Wright 1983, Ch.3). J. L. Mackie, on the
other hand, proposes an error-theoretic account of morals, not because
there are no objects or entities that could form the subject matter of
ethics (it is no part of Mackie's brief to deny the existence of
persons and their actions and so on), but because it is implausible to
suppose that the sorts of properties that moral properties would have
to be are ever instantiated in the world (Mackie 1977, Ch.1). Like
Field on arithmetic, then, Mackie's central claim about the atomic,
declarative sentences of ethics (such as ‘Napoleon was
evil’) is that they are systematically and uniformly false. How
might one argue for such a radical-sounding thesis? The clearest way
to view Mackie's argument for the error-theory is as a conjunction of
a conceptual claim with an ontological claim (following Smith 1994,
pp.63–66). The conceptual claim is that our concept of a moral fact is
a concept of an objectively prescriptive fact, or, equivalently, that
our concept of a moral property is a concept of an objectively
prescriptive quality (what Mackie means by this is explained
below). The ontological claim is simply that there are no objectively
prescriptive facts, that objectively prescriptive properties are
nowhere instantiated. The conclusion is that there is nothing in the
world answering to our moral concepts, no facts or properties which
render the judgements formed via those moral concepts true. Our moral
judgements are all of them false. We can thus construe the
error-theory as follows:

Conceptual Claim: our concept of a moral fact is a
concept of an objectively prescriptive fact, so that the truth of an
atomic, declarative moral sentence would require the existence of
objectively and categorically prescriptive facts.

Ontological Claim: there are no objectively and
categorically prescriptive facts.

So,

Conclusion: there are no moral facts; atomic,
declarative moral sentences are systematically and uniformly false.

This argument is clearly valid, so the question facing those who wish
to defend at least the existence dimension of realism in the case of
morals is whether the premises are true. (Note that strictly speaking
the conclusion of the argument is that there are no moral facts
as-we-conceive-of-them. Thus, it may be possible to block the argument
by advocating a revisionary approach to our moral concepts).

Mackie's conceptual claim is that our concept of a moral requirement
is the concept of an objectively, categorically prescriptive
requirement. What does this mean? To say that moral requirements are
prescriptive is to say that they tell us how we ought to act, to say
that they give us reasons for acting. Thus, to say that something is
morally good is to say that we ought to pursue it, that we have reason
to pursue it. To say that something is morally bad is to say that we
ought not to pursue it, that we have reason not to pursue it. To say
that moral requirements are categorically prescriptive is to say that
these reasons are categorical in the sense of Kant's categorical
imperatives. The reasons for action that moral requirements furnish
are not contingent upon the possession of any desires or wants on the
part of the agent to whom they are addressed: I cannot release myself
from the requirement imposed by the claim that torturing the innocent
is wrong by citing some desire or inclination that I have. This
contrasts, for example, with the requirement imposed by the claim that
perpetual lateness at work is likely to result in one losing one's
job: I can release myself from the requirement imposed by this claim
by citing my desire to lose my job (perhaps because I find it
unfulfilling, or whatever). Reasons for action which are contingent in
this way on desires and inclinations are furnished by what Kant called
hypothetical imperatives.

So our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of a categorically
prescriptive requirement. But Mackie claims further that our concept
of a moral requirement is a concept of an objectively categorically
prescriptive requirement. What does it mean to say that a requirement
is objective? Mackie says a lot of different-sounding things about
this, and the following is by no means a comprehensive list
(references are to Ch. 1 of Mackie 1977). To call a requirement
objective is to say that it can be an object of knowledge (24, 31,
33), that it can be true or false (26, 33), that it can be perceived
(31, 33), that it can be recognised (42), that it is prior to and
independent of our preferences and choices (30, 43), that it is a
source of authority external to our preferences and choices (32, 34,
43), that it is part of the fabric of the world (12), that it backs up
and validates some of our preferences and choices (22), that it is
capable of being simply true (30) or valid as a matter of general
logic (30), that it is not constituted by our choosing or deciding to
think in a certain way (30), that it is extra-mental (23), that it is
something of which we can be aware (38), that it is something that can
be introspected (39), that it is something that can figure as a
premise in an explanatory hypothesis or inference (39), and so
on. Mackie plainly does not take these to be individually necessary:
facts about subatomic particles, for example, may qualify as objective
in virtue of figuring in explanatory hypotheses even though they
cannot be objects of perceptual acquaintance. But his intention is
plain enough: these are the sorts of conditions whose satisfaction by
a fact renders it objective as opposed to subjective. Mackie's
conceptual claim about morality is thus that our concept of a moral
requirement is a concept of a fact which is objective in at least some
of the senses just listed, while his ontological claim will be that
the world does not contain any facts which are both candidates for
being moral facts and yet which play even some of the roles
distinctive of objective facts.

How plausible is Mackie's conceptual claim? This issue cannot be
discussed in detail here, except to note that while it seems plausible
to claim that if our concept of a moral fact is a concept of
a reason for action then that concept must be a concept of a
categorical reason for action, it is not so clear why we have to say
that our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action
at all. If we deny this, we can concede the conditional claim whilst
resisting Mackie's conceptual claim. One way to do this would be to
question the assumption, implicit in the exposition of Mackie's
argument for the conceptual claim above, that an
‘ought’-statement that binds an agent A provides that
agent with a reason for action. For an example of a version of moral
realism that attempts to block Mackie's conceptual claim in this way,
see Railton (1986). For defence of Mackie's conceptual claim, see
Smith (1994), Ch.3. For exposition and critical discussion, see Miller
(2013a), Ch.9.

What is Mackie's argument for his ontological claim? This is set out
in his ‘argument from queerness’ (Mackie has another
argument, the ‘argument from relativity’
(or ‘argument from disagreement’) (1977: 36–38), but
this argument cannot be discussed here for reasons of space. For a
useful discussion, see Brink (1984)).The argument from queerness has
both metaphysical and epistemological components. The metaphysical
problem with objective values concerns ‘the metaphysical
peculiarity of the supposed objective values, in that they would have
to be intrinsically action-guiding and motivating’ (49). The
epistemological problem concerns ‘the difficulty of accounting
for our knowledge of value entities or features and of their links
with the features on which they would be consequential’
(49). Let's look at each type of worry more closely in turn.

Expounding the metaphysical part of the argument from queerness,
Mackie writes: “If there were objective values, then they would
be entities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different
from anything else in the universe.” (38) What is so strange
about them? Mackie says that Plato's Forms (and for that matter,
Moore's non-natural qualities) give us a ‘dramatic
picture’ of what objective values would be, if there were
any:

The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower
with both a direction and an overriding motive; something's being good
both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue
it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted
with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every
person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because
the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly, if
there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong
(possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow
built into it. Or we should have something like Clarke's necessary
relations of fitness between situations and actions, so that a
situation would have a demand for such-and-such an action somehow
built into it (40).

The obtaining of a moral state of affairs would be the obtaining of a
situation ‘with a demand for such and such an action somehow
built into it’; the states of affairs which we find in the world
do not have such demands built into them, they are ‘normatively
inert’, as it were. Thus, the world contains no moral states of
affairs, situations which consist in the instantiation of a moral
quality.

Mackie now backs up this metaphysical argument with an
epistemological argument:

If we were aware [of objective values], it would have to be by some
special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different
from our ways of knowing everything else. These points were recognised
by Moore when he spoke of non-natural qualities, and by the
intuitionists in their talk about a faculty of moral intuition.
Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it is indeed easy to
point out its implausibilities. What is not so often stressed, but is
more important, is that the central thesis of intuitionism is one to
which any objectivist view of values is in the end committed:
intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of
objectivism wrap up (38).

In short, our ordinary conceptions of how we might come into
cognitive contact with states of affairs, and thereby acquire
knowledge of them, cannot cope with the idea that the states of
affairs are objective values. So we are forced to expand that ordinary
conception to include forms of moral perception and intuition. But
these are completely unexplanatory: they are really just placeholders
for our capacity to form correct moral judgements (the reader should
here hear an echo of the complaints Benacerraf and Field raise against
arithmetical platonism).

Evaluating the argument from queerness is well outwith the scope of
the present entry. While Railton's version of moral realism attempts
to block Mackie's overall argument by conceding his ontological claim
whilst rejecting his conceptual claim, other versions of moral realism
agree with Mackie's conceptual claim but reject his ontological claim.
Examples of the latter version, and attempts to provide the owed
response to the argument from queerness, can be found in Smith (1994),
Ch.6, and McDowell (1998a), Chs 4–10.

There are two main ways in which one might respond to Mackie's
argument for the error-theory: directly, via contesting one of its
premises or inferences, or indirectly, pointing to some internal
tension within the error-theory itself. Some possible direct responses
have already been mentioned, responses which reject either the conceptual
or ontological claims that feature as premises in Mackie's argument
for the error-theory. An indirect argument against the error-theory
has been developed in recent writings by Crispin Wright (this argument
is intended to apply also to Field's error-theory of arithmetic).

Mackie claims that the error-theory of moral judgement is a
second-order theory, which does not necessarily have implications for
the first order practice of making moral judgements (1977: 16).
Wright's argument against the error-theory takes off with the forceful
presentation of the opposing suspicion:

The great discomfort with [Mackie's] view is that, unless more is
said, it simply relegates moral discourse to bad faith. Whatever we
may once have thought, as soon as philosophy has taught us that the
world is unsuited to confer truth on any of our claims about what is
right, or wrong, or obligatory, etc., the reasonable response ought
surely to be to forgo the right to making any such claims …. If
it is of the essence of moral judgement to aim at the truth, and if
philosophy teaches us that there is no moral truth to hit, how are we
supposed to take ourselves seriously in thinking the way we do about
any issue which we regard as of major moral importance? (1996: 2; see
also 1992: 9).

Wright realises that the error-theorist is likely to have a story to
tell about the point of moral discourse, about “some norm of
appraisal besides truth, at which its statements can be seen as aimed,
and which they can satisfy.” (1996: 2) And Mackie has such a
story: the point of moral discourse is—to simplify—to
secure the benefits of social co-operation (1973: chapter 5 passim;
note that this is the analogue in Mackie's theory of Field's notion of
the conservativeness of mathematical theories). Suppose we can extract
from this story some subsidiary norm distinct from truth, which
governs the practice of forming moral judgements. Then, for example,
‘Honesty is good’ and ‘Dishonesty is good’,
although both false, will not be on a par in point of their
contribution to the satisfaction of the subsidiary norm: if accepted
widely enough, the former will presumably facilitate the satisfaction
of the subsidiary norm, while the latter, if accepted widely enough,
will frustrate it. Wright questions whether Mackie's moral sceptic can
plausibly combine such a story about the benefits of the practice of
moral judgement with the central negative claim of the
error-theory:

[I]f, among the welter of falsehoods which we enunciate in moral
discourse, there is a good distinction to be drawn between those which
are acceptable in the light of some such subsidiary norm and those
which are not—a distinction which actually informs ordinary
discussion and criticism of moral claims—then why insist on
construing truth for moral discourse in terms which motivate
a charge of global error, rather than explicate it in terms of the
satisfaction of the putative subsidiary norm, whatever it is? The
question may have a good answer. The error-theorist may be able to
argue that the superstition that he finds in ordinary moral thought
goes too deep to permit of any construction of moral truth
which avoids it to be acceptable as an account of moral truth. But I
do not know of promising argument in that direction (1996: 3; see also
1992: 10).

Wright thus argues that even if we concede to the error-theorist that
his original scepticism about moral truth is well-founded, the
error-theorist's own positive proposal will be inherently
unstable. For an attempt to respond to Wright's argument on behalf of
the error-theorist, see Miller 2002. In recent years, inspired by
error-theory, philosophers have developed forms of moral fictionalism,
according to which moral claims either are or ought to be
“useful fictions”. See Kalderon 2005 and Joyce 2001 for
examples. For a book-length treatment of moral error-theory, see Olson 2014.

The error-theories proposed by Mackie and Field are non-eliminativist
error-theories, and should be contrasted with the kind of
eliminativist error-theory proposed by e.g. Paul Churchland concerning
folk-psychological propositional attitudes (see Churchland
1981). Churchland argues that our everyday talk of propositional
attitudes such as beliefs, desires and intentions should eventually be
abandoned given developments in neuroscience. Mackie and Field make no
analogous claims concerning morality and arithmetic: no claim, that
is, to the effect that they will one day be in principle replaceable
by philosophically hygienic counterparts.

Although some commentators (e.g. Pettit 1991) require that a
realistic view of a subject matter be non-reductionist about the
distinctive objects, properties, and facts of that subject matter, the
reductionist/non-reductionist issue is really orthogonal to the
various debates about realism. There are a number of reasons for this,
with the reasons varying depending on the type of reduction
proposed.

Suppose, first of all, that one wished to deny the existence claim
which is a component of platonic realism about arithmetic. One way to
do this would be to propose an analytic reduction of talk
seemingly involving abstract entities to talk concerning only concrete
entities. This can be illustrated by considering a language the truth
of whose sentences seemingly entails the existence of a type of
abstract object, directions. Suppose there is a first order language
L, containing a range of proper names ‘a’,
‘b’, ‘c’, and so on, where
these denote straight lines conceived as concrete inscriptions. There
are also predicates and relations defined on straight lines, including
‘ … is parallel to …’. ‘D(
)’ is a singular term forming operator on lines, so that
inserting the name of a concrete line, as in
‘D(a)’, produces a singular term
standing for an abstract object, the direction of a. A number
of contextual definitions are now introduced:

(A) ‘D(a) = D(b)’ is
true if and only if a is parallel to b.

(B)
‘ΠD(x)’ is true if and only if
‘Fx’ is true, where ‘… is parallel
to …’ is a congruence for ‘F(
)’.

(To say that ‘… is parallel to …’ is a
congruence for ‘F( )’ is to say that if
a is parallel to b and Fa, then it follows
that Fb).

(C)
‘(∃x)Πx’ is true if and only
if ‘(∃x)Fx’ is true, where
‘Π’ and ‘F’ are as in (B).

According to a platonic realist, directions exist and have a nature
which is independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices,
conceptual schemes, and so on. But doesn't the availability of (A),
(B), and (C) undermine the existence claim at the heart of platonic
realism? After all, (A), (B), and (C) allow us to paraphrase any
sentence whose truth appears to entail the existence of abstract
objects into a sentence whose truth involves only the existence of
concrete inscriptions. Doesn't this show that an analytic reduction
can aid someone wishing to question the existence claim involved in a
particular form of realism? There is a powerful argument, first
developed by William Alston (1958), and recently resuscitated to great
effect by Crispin Wright (1983, Ch.1), that suggests not. The analytic
reductionist who wishes to wield the contextual definitions against
the existence claim at the heart of platonic realism takes them to
show that the apparent reference to abstract objects on the left-hand
sides of the definitions is merely apparent: in fact, the
truth of the relevant sentences entails only the existence of a range
of concrete inscriptions. But the platonic realist can retort: what
the contextual definitions show is that the apparent lack of
reference to abstract objects on the right-hand sides is
merely apparent. In fact, the platonic realist can say, the truth of
the sentences figuring on the right-hand sides implicitly involves
reference to abstract objects. If there is no way to break this
deadlock the existence of the analytic reductive paraphrases will
leave the existence claim at the heart of the relevant form of realism
untouched. So the issue of this style of reductionism appears to be
orthogonal to debates between realists and non-realists.

Can the same be said about non-analytic styles of reductionism?
Again, there is no straightforward connection between the issue of
reductionism and the issue of realism. The problem is that, to borrow
some terminology and examples from Railton 1989, some reductions will
be vindicative whilst others will be eliminativist.
For example, the reduction of water to H20 is vindicative:
it vindicates our belief that there is such a thing as water, rather
than overturning it. On the other hand:

… the reduction of ‘polywater’—a peculiar
form of water thought to have been observed in laboratories in the
1960's—to
ordinary-water-containing-some-impurities-from-improperly-washed-glassware
contributed to the conclusion that there really is no such substance
as polywater (1989: 161).

Thus, a non-analytic reduction may or may not have implications for
the existence dimension of a realistic view of a particular subject
matter. And even if the existence dimension is vindicated, there is
still the further question whether the objects and properties
vindicated are independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices,
and so on. Again, there is no straightforward relationship between the
issue of reductionism and the issue of realism.

We saw above that for the subject-matter in question the
error-theorist agrees with the realist that the truth of the
atomic, declarative sentences of that area requires the existence of
the relevant type of objects, or the instantiation of the relevant
sorts of properties. Although the realist and the error-theorist agree
on this much, they of course disagree on the question of whether the
relevant type of objects exist, or on whether the relevant sorts of
properties are instantiated: the error-theorist claims that they
don't, so that the atomic, declarative sentences of the area are
systematically and uniformly false, the realist claims that at least
in some instances the relevant objects exist or the relevant
properties are instantiated, so that the atomic, declarative sentences
of the area are at least in some instances true. We also saw that an
error-theory about a particular area could be motivated by
epistemological worries (Field) or by a combination of epistemological
and metaphysical worries (Mackie).

Another way in which the existence dimension of realism can be
resisted is via expressivism. Whereas the realist and the
error-theorist agree that the sentences of the relevant area are
truth-apt, apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity,
the realist and the expressivist (alternatively non-cognitivist,
projectivist) disagree about the truth-aptness of those sentences. It
is a fact about English that sentences in the declarative mood
(‘The beer is in the fridge’) are conventionally used for
making assertions, and assertions are true or false depending on
whether or not the fact that is asserted to obtain actually
obtains. But there are other grammatical moods that are conventionally
associated with different types of speech-act. For example, sentences
in the imperatival mood (‘Put the beer in the fridge’) are
conventionally used for giving orders, and sentences in the
interrogative mood (‘Is the beer in the fridge?’) are
conventionally used for asking questions. Note that we would not
ordinarily think of orders or questions as even apt for assessment in
terms of truth and falsity: they are not truth-apt. Now the
conventions mentioned here are not exceptionless: for example, one can
use sentences in the declarative mood (‘My favourite drink is
Belhaven 60 shilling’) to give an order (for some Belhaven 60
shilling), one can use sentences in the interrogative mood (‘Is
the Pope a Catholic?’) to make an assertion (of whatever fact
was the subject of the discussion), and so on. The expressivist about
a particular area will claim that the realist is misled by the syntax
of the sentences of that area into thinking that they are truth-apt:
she will say that this is a case where the conventional association of
the declarative mood with assertoric force breaks down. In the moral
case the expressivist can claim that ‘Stealing is wrong’
is no more truth-apt than ‘Put the beer in the fridge’: it
is just that the lack of truth-aptness of the latter is worn on its
sleeve, while the lack of truth-aptness of the former is veiled by its
surface syntax.(There are some important issues concerning the
relationship between minimalism about truth-aptitude and expressivism
that we cannot go into here. See Divers and Miller (1995)and Miller (2013b) for some
pointers. There are also some important differences between
e.g. Ayer's emotivism and more modern forms of expressivism (such as
those developed by Blackburn and Gibbard) that we gloss over here. For
a useful account, see Schroeder 2009).

So, if moral sentences are not conventionally used for the making of
assertions, what are they conventionally used for? According to one
classical form of expressivism, emotivism, they are
conventionally used for the expression of emotion, feeling, or
sentiment. Thus, A.J. Ayer writes:

If I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that
money’, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply
said, ‘You stole that money’. In adding that this action
is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am
simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is as if I had
said, ‘You stole that money’, in a peculiar tone of
horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation
marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal
meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the
expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker
(Ayer 1946: 107, emphases added).

It follows from this that:

If I now generalise my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing
money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual
meaning—that is, expresses no proposition that can be either
true or false (1946: 107).

Emotivism faces many problems, discussion of which is not possible
here (for a survey, see Miller 2003a Ch.3). One problem that has been
the bugbear of all expressivist versions of non-realism, the
‘Frege-Geach Problem’, is so-called because the classic
modern formulation is by Peter Geach (1960), who attributes the
original point to Frege.

According to emotivism, when I sincerely utter the sentence
‘Murder is wrong’ I am not expressing a belief or making
an assertion, but rather expressing some non-cognitive sentiment or
feeling, incapable of being true or false. Thus, the emotivist claims
that in contexts where ‘Murder is wrong’ is apparently
being used to assert that murder is wrong it is in fact being used to
express a sentiment or feeling of disapproval towards murder. But what
about contexts in which it is not even apparently the case that
‘Murder is wrong’ is being used to make an assertion? An
example of such a sentence would be ‘If murder is wrong, then
getting little brother to murder people is wrong’. In the
antecedent of this ‘Murder is wrong’ is clearly not even
apparently being used to make an assertion. So what account can the
emotivist give of the use of ‘Murder is wrong’ within
‘unasserted contexts’, such as the antecedent of the
conditional above? Since it is not there used to express disapproval
of murder, the account of its semantic function must be different from
that given for the apparently straightforward assertion expressed by
‘Murder is wrong’. But now there is a problem in
accounting for the following apparently valid inference:

(1) Murder is wrong.

(2) If Murder is wrong, then getting your little brother to murder
people is wrong.

Therefore:

(3) Getting your little brother to murder people is wrong.

If the semantic function of ‘Murder is wrong’ as it
occurs within an asserted context in (1) is different from its
semantic function as it occurs within an unasserted context in (2),
isn't someone arguing in this way simply guilty of equivocation? In
order for the argument to be valid, the occurrence of ‘Murder is
wrong’ in (1) has to mean the same thing as the
occurrence of ‘Murder is wrong’ in (2). But if
‘Murder is wrong’ has a different semantic function in (1)
and (2), then it certainly doesn't mean the same thing in (1) and
(2). So the above argument is apparently no more valid than:

(4) My beer has a head on it.

(5) If something has a head on it, then it must have eyes and
ears.

Therefore:

(6) My beer must have eyes and ears.

This argument is obviously invalid, because it relies on an
equivocation on two senses of ‘head’, in (4) and (5)
respectively.

It is perhaps worth stressing why the Frege-Geach problem doesn't
afflict ethical theories which see ‘Murder is wrong’ as
truth-apt, and sincere utterances of ‘Murder is wrong’ as
capable of expressing straightforwardly truth-assessable
beliefs. According to theories like these, moral modus ponens
arguments such as the argument above from (1) and (2) to (3) are just
like non-moral cases of modus ponens such as

(7) It is raining;

(8) If it is raining then the streets are wet;

Therefore,

(9) the streets are wet.

Why is this non-moral case of modus ponens not similarly
invalid in virtue of the fact that ‘It is raining’ is
asserted in (7), but not in (8)? The answer is of course that the
state of affairs asserted to obtain by ‘It is raining’ in
(7) is the same as that whose obtaining is merely entertained in the
antecedent of (8). In (7) ‘It is raining’ is used to
assert that a state of affairs obtains (it's raining), and in (8) it
is asserted that if that state of affairs obtains, so does another
(the streets being wet). Throughout, the semantic function of the
sentences concerned is given in terms of the states of affairs
asserted to obtain in simple assertoric contexts. And it is difficult
to see how an emotivist can say anything analogous to this with
respect to the argument from (1) and (2) to (3): it is difficult to
see how the semantic function of ‘Murder is wrong’ in the
antecedent of (2) could be given in terms of the sentiment it
allegedly expresses in (1).

The Frege-Geach challenge to the emotivist is thus to answer the
following question: how can you give an emotivist account of the
occurrence of moral sentences in ‘unasserted
contexts’—such as the antecedents of
conditionals—without jeopardising the intuitively valid patterns
of inference in which those sentences figure? Philosophers wishing to
develop an expressivistic alternative to moral realism have expended a
great deal of energy and ingenuity in devising responses to this
challenge. See in particular Blackburn's development of
‘quasi-realism’, in his (1984) Chs 5 and 6, (1993) Ch.10,
(1998) Ch.3 and Gibbard's ‘norm-expressivism’, in his
(1990) Ch.5, and further refined in his (2003). For criticism see Hale
(1993) and (2002), and Kölbel (2002) Ch.4. For an overview, see
Schroeder (2008) and Miller (2013a), Chs 4 and 5. For very useful
surveys of recent work on expressivism, see Schroeder (2009) and
Sinclair (2009).

Challenges to the existence dimension of realism have been outlined
in previous sections. In this section some forms of non-realism that
are neither error-theoretic nor expressivist will be briefly
introduced. The forms of non-realism view the sentences of the
relevant area as (against the expressivist) truth-apt, and (against
the error-theorist) at least sometimes true. The existence dimension
of realism is thus left intact. What is challenged is the independence
dimension of realism, the claim that the objects distinctive of the
area exist, or that the properties distinctive of the area are
instantiated, independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices,
conceptual schemes, and so on.

Classically, opposition to the independence dimension of realism about
the everyday world of macroscopic objects took the form of
idealism, the view that the objects of the everyday world of
macroscopic objects are in some sense mental. As Berkeley
famously claimed, tables, chairs, cats, the moons of Jupiter and so
on, are nothing but ideas in the minds of spirits:

All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all
those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any
subsistence without a mind (Berkeley 1710: §6).

Idealism has long been out of favour in contemporary philosophy, but
those who doubt the independence dimension of realism have sought more
sophisticated ways of opposing it. One such philosopher, Michael
Dummett, has suggested that in some cases it may be appropriate to
reject the independence dimension of realism via the rejection of
semantic realism about the area in question (see Dummett 1978 and
1993). This section contains a brief explanation of semantic realism,
as characterised by Dummett, Dummett's views on the relationship
between semantic realism and realism construed as a metaphysical
thesis, and an outline of some of the arguments in the philosophy of
language that Dummett has suggested might be wielded against semantic
realism.

It is easiest to characterise semantic realism for a mathematical
domain. It is a feature of arithmetic that there are some arithmetical
sentences for which the following holds true: we know of no method
that will guarantee us a proof of the sentence, and we know of no
method that will guarantee us a disproof or a counterexample
either. One such is Goldbach's Conjecture:

(G) Every even number is the sum of two primes.

It is possible that we may come across a proof, or a counterexample,
but the key point is that we do not know a method, or methods, the
application of which is guaranteed to yield one or the other. A
semantic realist, in Dummett's sense, is one who holds that our
understanding of a sentence like (G) consists in knowledge of its
truth-condition, where the notion of truth involved is potentially
recognition-transcendent or bivalent. To say that the
notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent is to
say that (G) may be true (or false) even though there is no guarantee
that we will be able, in principle, to recognise that that is so. To
say that the notion of truth involved is bivalent is to accept the
unrestricted applicability of the law of bivalence, that every
meaningful sentence is determinately either true or false. Thus the
semantic realist is prepared to assert that (G) is determinately
either true or false, regardless of the fact that we have no
guaranteed method of ascertaining which. (Note that the precise
relationship between the characterisation in terms of bivalence and
that in terms of potentially recognition-transcendent truth is a
delicate matter that will not concern us here. See the Introduction to
Wright 1993 for some excellent discussion. It is also important to
note that in introducing the idea that a speaker's understanding of a
sentence consists in her knowledge of its truth-condition, Dummett is
packing more into the notion of truth than the disquotational
properties made use of in §1 above. See Dummett's essay
‘Truth’, in his 1978).

Dummett makes two main claims about semantic realism. First, there is
what Devitt (1991a) has termed the metaphor thesis: This
denies that we can even have a literal, austerely
metaphysical characterisation of realism of the sort attempted above
with Generic Realism. Dummett writes, of the attempt to give an
austere metaphysical characterisation of realism about mathematics
(platonic realism) and what stands opposed to it (intuitionism):

How [are] we to decide this dispute over the ontological status of
mathematical objects[?] As I have remarked, we have here two
metaphors: the platonist compares the mathematician with the
astronomer, the geographer or the explorer, the intuitionist compares
him with the sculptor or the imaginative writer; and neither
comparison seems very apt. The disagreement evidently relates to the
amount of freedom that the mathematician has. Put this way, however,
both seem partly right and partly wrong: the mathematician has great
freedom in devising the concepts he introduces and in delineating the
structure he chooses to study, but he cannot prove just whatever he
decides it would be attractive to prove. How are we to make the
disagreement into a definite one, and how can we then resolve it?
(1978: xxv).

According to the constitution thesis, the literal content of
realism consists in the content of semantic realism. Thus,
the literal content of realism about the external world is constituted
by the claim that our understanding of at least some sentences
concerning the external world consists in our grasp of their
potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions. The spurious
‘debate’ in metaphysics between realism and non-realism
can thus become a genuine debate within the theory of
meaning: should we characterise speakers' understanding in terms of
grasp of potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions? As
Dummett puts it:

The dispute [between realism and its opponents] concerns the notion
of truth appropriate for statements of the disputed class; and this
means that it is a dispute concerning the kind of meaning
which these statements have (1978: 146).

Few have been convinced by either the metaphor thesis or the
constitution thesis. Consider Generic Realism in the case of the world
of everyday macroscopic objects and properties:

(GR1) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact
that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape, colour,
and so on, is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort
sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone's
beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Dummett may well call for some non-metaphorical characterisation of
the independence claim which this involves, but it is relatively easy
to provide one such characterisation by utilising Dummett's own notion
of recognition-transcendence:

(GR2) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact
that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape,colour,
and so on, is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort
sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone's
beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. Tables,
rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and in general there is no
guarantee that we will be able, even in principle, to recognise the
fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape,
colour, and so on.

On the face of it, there is nothing metaphorical in (GR2) or, at
least if there is, some argument from Dummett to that effect is
required. This throws some doubt on the metaphor thesis. And there is
nothing distinctively semantic about (GR2), and this throws some doubt
on the constitution thesis. Whereas for Dummett, the essential realist
thesis is the meaning-theoretic claim that our understanding of a
sentence like (G) consists in knowledge of its potentially
recognition-transcendent truth-condition, for Devitt:

What has truth to do with Realism? On the face of it, nothing at
all. Indeed, Realism says nothing semantic at all beyond
… making the negative point that our semantic capacities do
not constitute the world. (1991a: 39)

Devitt's main criticism of the constitution thesis is this: the
literal content of realism about the external world is not given by
semantic realism, since semantic realism is consistent with an
idealist metaphysics of the external world. He writes:

Does [semantic realism] entail Realism? It does not. Realism …
requires the objective independent existence of common-sense physical
entities. Semantic Realism concerns physical statements and
has no such requirement: it says nothing about the nature of the
reality that makes those statements true or false, except that it
is [at least in part potentially beyond the reach of our best
investigative efforts]. An idealist who believed in the …
existence of a purely mental realm of sense-data could subscribe to
[semantic realism]. He could believe that physical statements are true
or false according as they do or do not correspond to the realm of
sense-data, whatever anyone's opinion on the matter: we have no
‘incorrigible knowledge’ of sense-data. … In sum,
mere talk of truth will not yield any particular ontology. (1983: 77)

Suppose that Dummett's metaphor and constitution theses are both
implausible. Would it follow that the arguments Dummett develops
against semantic realism have no relevance to debates about the
plausibility of realism about everyday macroscopic objects (say),
construed as a purely metaphysical thesis as in (GR2)? It can be
argued that Dummett's arguments can retain their relevance to a
metaphysical debate even if the metaphor and constitution theses are
false, and, indeed, even if Dummett's view (1973: 669) that the theory
of meaning is the foundation of all philosophy is rejected. For a full
development of this line of argument, see Miller 2003b and 2006.

Dummett has two main lines of argument against semantic realism, the
acquisition argument and the manifestation
argument. Here is the acquisition argument:

Suppose that we are considering some region of discourse D,
the sentences of which we intuitively understand. Suppose, for
reductio, that the sentences of D have potentially
recognition-transcendent truth-conditions. Thus,

(1) We understand the sentences of D.

(2) The sentences of D have recognition-transcendent
truth-conditions.

Now, from (1) together with the Fregean thesis that to understand a
sentence is to know its truth-conditions (see Miller 2007, Chs 1 and
2), we have:

(3) We know the truth-conditions of the sentences of D.

We now add the apparently reasonable constraint on ascriptions of
knowledge:

(4) If a piece of knowledge is ascribed to a speaker,
then it must be at least in principle possible for that speaker to
have acquired that knowledge.

So,

(5) It must be at least in principle possible for us to
have acquired knowledge of the recognition-transcendent
truth-conditions of D.

But,

(6) We could not have acquired knowledge of
recognition-transcendent truth-conditions.

So, by reductio, we reject (2) to get:

(7) The sentences of D do not have
recognition-transcendent truth-conditions, so semantic realism about
the subject matter of D must be rejected.

The crucial premise here is obviously (6). Wright suggests that there
is no plausible story to be told about how we could have acquired
knowledge of recognition-transcendent truth-conditions:

How are we supposed to be able to form any understanding of
what it is for a particular statement to be true if the kind of state
of affairs which it would take to make it true is conceived, ex
hypothesi, as something beyond our experience, something which we
cannot confirm and which is insulated from any distinctive impact on
our consciousness? (1993: 13).

However, Wright then more or less concedes that the acquisition
argument can be neutralised by invoking the compositionality
of meaning and understanding:

[T]he realist seems to have a very simple answer. Given that the
understanding of statements in general is to be viewed as consisting
in possession of a concept of their truth-conditions, acquiring a
concept of an evidence-transcendent state of affairs is simply a
matter of acquiring an understanding of a statement for which that
state of affairs would constitute the truth-condition. And such an
understanding is acquired, like the understanding of any previously
unheard sentence in the language, by understanding the constituent
words and the significance of their mode of combination. (1993:
16)

Dummett's challenge to semantic realism, then, turns on his second
argument, the manifestation argument. Suppose that we are
considering region of discourse D as before. Then:

(1) We understand the sentences of D.

Suppose, for reductio, that

(2) The sentences of D have recognition-transcendent
truth-conditions.

From (1) and the Fregean thesis that to understand a sentence is
to know its truth-conditions, we have:

(3) We know the truth-conditions of the sentences of D.

We then add the following premise, which stems from the
Wittgensteinian insight that understanding does not consist in the
possession of an inner state, but rather in the possession of some
practical ability (see Wittgenstein 1958):

(4) If speakers possess a piece of knowledge which is constitutive of
linguistic understanding, then that knowledge should be
manifested in speakers' use of the language i.e. in their
exercise of the practical abilities which constitute linguistic
understanding.

For example, in the case of a simple language consisting of
demonstratives and taste predicates (such as "bitter" and "sweet"),
applied to foodstuffs within reach of the speaker, a speaker's
understanding consists in his ability to determine whether "this is
bitter" is true, by putting the relevant foodstuff in his mouth and
tasting it (Wright 1993).

It now follows from (1), (2), (3) and (4) that:

(5) Our knowledge of the recognition-transcendent
truth-conditions of the sentences of D should be manifested
in our use of those sentences, i.e. in our exercise of the practical
abilities which constitute our understanding of D.

Since

(6) Such knowledge is never manifested in the exercise of the
practical abilities which constitute our understanding of
D,

It follows that

(7) We do not possess knowledge of the truth-conditions of D.

(7) and (3) together give us a contradiction, whence, by
reductio, we reject (2) to obtain:

(8) The sentences of D do not have recognition-transcendent
truth-conditions, so semantic realism about the subject matter of
D must be rejected.

The key claim here is (6). So far as an account of speakers'
understanding goes, the ascription of knowledge of
recognition-transcendent truth-conditions is simply
redundant: there is no good reason for ascribing it. Consider
one of the sentences introduced earlier as a candidate for possessing
recognition-transcendent truth-conditions ‘Every even number
greater than two is the sum of two primes’. The semantic realist
views our understanding of sentences like this as consisting in our
knowledge of a potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition.
But:

How can that account be viewed as a description of any
practical ability of use? No doubt someone who understands
such a statement can be expected to have many relevant practical
abilities. He will be able to appraise evidence for or against it,
should any be available, or to recognize that no information in his
possession bears on it. He will be able to recognize at least some of
its logical consequences, and to identify beliefs from which
commitment to it would follow. And he will, presumably, show himself
sensitive to conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe
propositional attitudes embedding the statement to himself and to
others, and sensitive to the explanatory significance of such
ascriptions. In short: in these and perhaps other important respects,
he will show himself competent to use the sentence. But the headings
under which his practical abilities fall so far involve no mention of
evidence-transcendent truth-conditions (Wright 1993: 17).

This establishes (6), and the conclusion follows swiftly.

A detailed assessment of the plausibility of Dummett's arguments is
impossible here. For a full response to the manifestation argument,
see Miller 2002. See also Byrne 2005. For the acquisition argument,
see Miller 2003c. Wright develops a couple of additional arguments
against semantic realism. For these—the argument from
rule-following and the argument from normativity—see the
Introduction to Wright 1993. For an excellent survey of the literature
on Dummett's arguments against semantic realism, see Hale 1997. For
an excellent book-length introduction to Dummett's philosophy, see
Weiss 2002.

Suppose that one wished to develop a non-realist alternative to, say,
moral realism. Suppose also that one is persuaded of the
unattractiveness of both error-theoretic and expressivist forms of
non-realism. That is to say, one accepts that moral sentences are
truth-apt, and, at least in some cases, true. Then the only option
available would be to deny the independence dimension of moral
realism. But so far we have only seen one way of doing this: by
admitting that the relevant sentences are truth-apt, sometimes true,
and possessed of truth-conditions which are not potentially
recognition-transcendent. But this seems weak: it seems implausible
to suggest that a moral realist must be committed to the potential
recognition-transcendence of moral truth. It therefore seems
implausible to suggest that a non-expressivistic and
non-error-theoretic form of opposition to realism must be committed to
simply denying the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth,
since many who style themselves moral realists will deny this too. As
Wright puts it:

There are, no doubt, kinds of moral realism which do have the
consequence that moral reality may transcend all possibility of
detection. But it is surely not essential to any view worth regarding
as realist about morals that it incorporate a commitment to that idea.
(1992: 9)

So, if the debate between a realist and a non-realist about the
independence dimension doesn't concern the plausibility of semantic
realism as characterised by Dummett, what does it concern? (Henceforth
a non-error-theoretic, non-expressivist style of non-realist is
referred to as an anti-realist). Wright attempts to develop some
points of contention, (or ‘realism-relevant cruces’ as he
calls them) over which a realist and anti-realist could
disagree. Wright's development of this idea is subtle and
sophisticated and only a crude exposition of a couple of his
realism-relevant cruces can be given here.

The first of Wright's realism-relevant cruces to be considered here
concerns the capacity of states of affairs to figure ineliminably in
the explanation of features of our experience. The idea that the
explanatory efficacy of the states of affairs in some area has
something to do with the plausibility of a realist view of that area
is familiar from the debates in meta-ethics between philosophers such
as Nicholas Sturgeon (1988), who believe that irreducibly moral states
of affairs do figure ineliminably in the best explanation of certain
aspects of experience, and opponents such as Gilbert Harman (1977),
who believe that moral states of affairs have no such explanatory
role. This suggests a ‘best explanation test’ which,
crudely put, states that realism about a subject matter can be secured
if its distinctive states of affairs figure ineliminably in the best
explanation of aspects of experience. One could then be a
non-expressivist, non-error-theoretic, anti-realist about a particular
subject matter by denying that the distinctive states of affairs of
that subject matter do have a genuine role in best explanations of
aspects of our experience. And the debate between this style of
anti-realist and his realist opponent could proceed independently of
any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant
area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

For reasons that needn't detain us here, Wright suggests that this
‘best explanation test’ should be superseded by questions
concerning what he calls width of cosmological role (1992,
Ch.5). The states of affairs in a given area have narrow cosmological
role if it is a priori that they do not contribute to the explanation of things
other than our beliefs about that subject-matter (or other
than via explaining our beliefs about that subject
matter). This will be an anti-realist position. One style of realist
about that subject matter will say that its states of affairs have
wide cosmological role: they do contribute to the explanation of
things other than our beliefs about the subject matter in question (or
other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter). It
is relatively easy to see why width of cosmological role could be a
bone of contention between realist and anti-realist views of a given
subject matter: it is precisely the width of cosmological role of a
class of states of affairs—their capacity to explain things
other than, or other than via, our beliefs, in which their
independence from our beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on,
consists. Again, the debate between someone attributing a narrow
cosmological role to a class of states of affairs and someone
attributing a wide cosmological role could proceed independently of
any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant
area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

Wright thinks that it is arguable that moral discourse does not
satisfy width-of-cosmological role. Whereas a physical fact—such
as a pond's being frozen over—can contribute to the explanation
of cognitive effects (someone's believing that the pond is
frozen over), effects on sentient, but non-conceptual
creatures (the tendency of goldfish to cluster towards the bottom
of the pond), effects on us as physically interactive agents
(someone's slipping on the ice), and effects on inanimate
matter (the tendency of a thermometer to read zero when placed on
the surface), moral facts can only to contribute to the explanation
of the first sort of effect:

[I]t is hard to think of anything which is true of sentient but
non-conceptual creatures, or of mobile organisms, or of inanimate
matter, which is true because a … moral fact obtains and in
whose explanation it is unnecessary to advert to anyone's appreciation
of that moral fact (1996: 16).

Thus, we have a version of anti-realism about morals that is
non-expressivist and non-error-theoretic and can be framed
independently of considerations about the potential of moral sentences
to have recognition-transcendent truth-values: moral sentences are
truth-apt, sometimes true, and moral states of affairs have narrow
cosmological role.

The second of Wright's realism-relevant cruces concerns
judgement-dependence. Suppose that we are considering a region of
discourse D in which ‘P’ is a
representative central predicate. Consider the opinions formed by the
practitioners of that discourse, formed under cognitively ideal
conditions: call such opinions best opinions, and the
cognitively ideal conditions the C-conditions. Suppose that
the best opinions covary with the facts about the instantiation of
‘P’. Then there are two ways in which we can
explain this covariance. First, we might take best opinions to be
playing at most a tracking role: best opinions are just
extremely good at tracking independently constituted truth-conferring
states of affairs. In this case, best opinion plays only an
extension-reflecting role, merely reflecting the
independently determined extensions of the central predicates of
D. Alternatively, we might try to explain the covariance of
best opinion and fact by viewing best opinion as playing a different
sort of role. Rather than viewing best opinion as merely tracking the
facts about the extensions of the central predicates of D, we
can view them as themselves determining those
extensions. Best opinions, on this sort of view, do not just track
independently constituted states of affairs which determine the
extensions of the central predicates of D: rather, they
determine those extensions and so to play
an extension-determining role. When we have this latter sort
of explanation of the covariance of best opinion and fact, the
predicates of that region are said to be judgement-dependent;
when we have only the former sort of explanation, the predicates are
said to be judgement-independent.

How do we determine whether the central predicates of a region of
discourse are judgement-dependent? Wright's discussion proceeds by
reference to what he terms provisional equations. These have
the following form:

(PE) ∀x[C → (A suitable subject
s judges that Px ↔Px)]

where ‘C’ denotes the conditions (the
C-conditions) which are cognitively ideal for forming the
judgement that x is P. The predicate ‘P’
is then said to be judgement-dependent if and only if the provisional
equation meets the following four conditions:

The A Prioricity Condition: The provisional equation must be
a priori true: there must be a priori covariance of
best opinions and truth. (Justification: ‘the truth, if it is
true, that the extensions of [a class of concept] are constrained by
idealised human response—best opinion—ought to be
available purely by analytic reflection on those concepts, and hence
available as knowledge a priori’ (Wright 1992:
117)). This is because the thesis of judgement-dependence is the claim
that, for the region of discourse concerned, best opinion is the
conceptual ground of truth).

The Substantiality Condition The C-conditions must
be specifiable non-trivially: they cannot simply be described
as conditions under which the subject has ‘whatever it takes' to
form the right opinion concerning the subject matter at
hand.(Justification: without this condition, any predicate
will turn out to be judgement-dependent, since for any predicate
Q it is going to be an a priori truth that our
judgements about whether x is Q, formed under
conditions which have ‘whatever it takes' to ensure their
correctness, will covary with the facts about the instantiation of
Q-ness. We thus require this condition on pain of losing the
distinction between judgement-dependent and judgement-independent
predicates altogether).

The Independence Condition: The question as to whether the
C-conditions obtain in a given instance must be logically
independent of the class of truths for which we are attempting to give
an extension-determining account: for specifying what makes an opinion
best must not presuppose some logically prior determination of the
extensions putatively determined by best opinions. (Justification: if
we have to assume, say, certain facts about the extension of
P in the determination of the conditions under which opinions
about P count as best, then we cannot view best opinions as
somehow constituting those facts, since specifying whether a given
opinion is best would then presuppose some logically prior
determination of the very facts allegedly constituted by best
opinions).

The Extremal Condition: There must be no better way of
accounting for the a priori covariance: no better account,
other than according best opinion an extension-determining role, of
which the satisfaction of the foregoing three conditions is a
consequence. (Justification: without this condition, the satisfaction
of the foregoing conditions would be consistent with the thought that
certain states of affairs are judgement-independent even though
infallibly detectable, 'states of affairs in whose determination facts
about the deliverances of best opinions are in no way implicated
although there is, a priori, no possibility of their
misrepresentation’ (Wright 1992: 123)).

When all of the above conditions can be shown to be satisfied, we can
accord best opinion an extension-determining role, and describe the
subject matter as judgement-dependent. If these conditions cannot
collectively be satisfied, best opinion can be assigned, at best, a
merely extension-reflecting role.

Two points are worth making. First, it is again relatively easy to
see why the question of judgement-dependence can mark a bone of
contention between realism and anti-realism. If a subject matter is
judgement-dependent we have a concrete sense in which the independence
dimension of realism fails for that subject matter: there is a sense
in which that subject matter is not entirely independent of our
beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on. Second, the debate about the
judgement-dependence of a subject matter is, on the face of it at
least, independent of the debate about the possibility of
recognition-transcendent truth in that area.

Wright argues (1989) that facts about colours and intentions are
judgement-dependent, so that we can formulate a version of
anti-realism about colours (intentions) that views ascriptions of
colours (intentions) as truth-apt and sometimes true, and truth in
those areas as judgement-dependent. In contrast to this, Wright argues
(1988) that morals cannot plausibly be viewed as judgement-dependent,
so that a thesis of judgement-dependence is not a suitable vehicle for
the expression of a non-expressivistic, non-error-theoretic, version
of anti-realism about morality.

For discussion of further allegedly realism-relevant cruces, such as
cognitive command, see Wright 1992 and 2003. For critical discussion
of Wright on cognitive command, see Shapiro and Taschek 1996. See also
Miller 2004.It is the availability of these various realism-relevant
cruces that makes it possible to be more-or-less realist about a given
area: at one end of the spectrum there will be areas that fall on the
realist side of all of the cruces and at the opposite end areas that
fall on the non-realist side of all of the cruces, but in between
there will be a range of intermediate cases in which some-but-not-all
of the cruces are satisfied on the realist side.

Some of the ways in which non-realist theses about a particular
subject matter can be formulated and motivated have been described
above. Quietism is the view that significant metaphysical debate
between realism and non-realism is impossible. Gideon Rosen nicely
articulates the basic quietist thought:

We sense that there is a heady metaphysical thesis at stake
in these debates over realism—a question on a par with the issues
Kant first raised about the status of nature. But after a point, when
every attempt to say just what the issue is has come up empty, we have
no real choice but to conclude that despite all the wonderful,
suggestive imagery, there is ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to
discuss (1994: 279).

Quietism about the ‘debate’ between realists and their
opponents can take a number of forms. One form might claim that the
idea of a significant debate is generated by unsupported or
unsupportable philosophical theses about the relationship of the
experiencing and minded subject to their world, and that once these
theses are exorcised the ‘debate’ will gradually wither
away. This form of quietism is often associated with the work of the
later Wittgenstein, and receives perhaps its most forceful development
in the work of John McDowell (see in particular McDowell 1994). Other
forms of quietism may proceed in a more piecemeal fashion, taking
constraints such as Wright's realism-relevant Cruces and arguing on a
case-by-case basis that their satisfaction or non-satisfaction is of
no metaphysical consequence. This is in fact the strategy pursued in
Rosen 1994. He makes the following points regarding the two
realism-relevant Cruces considered in the previous section.

Suppose that:

(F) It is a priori that: x is funny if and only if
we would judge x funny under conditions of full information
about xs relevant extra-comedic features

and suppose that (F) satisfies (in addition to a prioricity) the
various other constraints that Wright imposes on his provisional
equations ((F) is actually not of the form of a provisional equation,
but this is not relevant to our purposes here). Rosen questions
whether this would be enough to establish that the facts about the
funny are in some metaphysically interesting sense ‘less
real’ or ‘less objective’ than facts (such as,
arguably, facts about shape) for which a suitable equation cannot be
constructed.

In a nutshell, Rosen's argument proceeds by inviting us to assume the
perspective of an anthropologist who is studying us and who ‘has
gotten to the point where he can reliably determine which jokes we
will judge funny under conditions of full relevant
information’ (1994: 302). Rosen writes:

[T]he important point is that from [the anthropologist's] point of
view, the facts about the distribution of [the property denoted by our
use of ‘funny’] are ‘mind-dependent’ only in
the sense that they supervene directly on facts about our minds. But
again, this has no tendency to undermine their objectivity …
[since] we have been given no reason to think that the facts about
what a certain group of people would think after a certain sort of
investigation are anything but robustly objective (1994: composed from
300 and 302).

How plausible is this attempt to deflate the significance of the
discovery that the subject matter of a particular area is, in Wright's
sense, judgement-dependent? Argument—as opposed to the trading
of intuitions—at this level is difficult, but Rosen's claim here
is very implausible. Suppose we found out that facts about the
distribution of gases on the moons of Jupiter supervened directly on
facts about our minds. Would the threat we then felt to the
objectivity of facts about the distribution of gases on the moons of
Jupiter be at all assuaged by the reflection that facts about the
mental might themselves be susceptible to realistic treatment? It
seems doubtful. Fodor's Psychosemantics would not offer much
solace to realists in the world described in Berkeley's
Principles. Rosen's claim derives some of its plausibility
from the fact that he uses examples, such as the funny and the
constitutional, where our pre-theoretical attachment to a realist view
is very weak: it may be that the judgement-dependence of the funny
doesn't undermine our sense of the objectivity of humour simply
because the level of objectivity we pretheoretically expect of comedy
is quite low. So although there is no knock-down argument to Rosen's
claim, it is much more counterintuitive than he would be willing to
admit.

Rosen also questions whether there is any intuitive connection
between considerations of width of cosmological role and issues of
realism and non-realism. Rosen doubts in particular that there is any
tight connection between facts of a certain class having only narrow
cosmological role and mind-dependence in any sense relevant to the
plausibility of realism. He writes:

It is possible to imagine a subtle physical property Q which,
though intuitively thoroughly objective, is nonetheless nomically
connected in the first instance only with brain state
B—where this happens to be the belief that things are
Q. This peculiar discovery would not undermine our confidence
that Q was an objective feature of things, as it should if [a
feature of objects is less than fully objective if it has narrow
cosmological role] (1994: 312).

However it seems that, at least in the first instance, Wright has a
relatively quick response to this point at his disposal. Waiving the
point that in any case the width of cosmological role constraint
applies to classes of properties and facts, he can point out
that in the example constructed by Rosen the narrowness of Q's
cosmological role is an a posteriori matter. Whereas what we
want is that the narrowness of cosmological role is an a
priori matter: one does not need to conduct an empirical
investigation to convince oneself that facts about the funny fail to
have wide cosmological role.

Wright thus has the beginnings of answers to Rosen's quietist attack
on his use of the notions of judgement-dependence and width of
cosmological role. It is not possible to deal fully with these
arguments here, let alone with the other quietist arguments in Rosen's
paper, or the arguments of other quietists such as McDowell, beyond
giving a flavour of how quietism might be motivated and how those
active in the debates between realists and their opponents might start
to respond. For a further discussion of quietism by Wright, see Wright 2007.

This discussion of realism and of the forms that non-realist
opposition may take is far from exhaustive, and aims only to give the
reader a sense of what to expect if they delve deeper into the
issues. In particular, nothing has been mentioned about the work of
Hilary Putnam, his characterisation of ‘metaphysical
realism’, and his so-called ‘model-theoretic’
argument against it. Putnam's writings are extensive, but one could
begin with Putnam 1981 and 1983. For critical discussion, see Hale and
Wright 1997 and Wright 2001; see also the entries on
scientific realism
and
challenges to metaphysical realism.
Nor have issues about the metaphysics of modality and
possible worlds been discussed. The locus classicus in this area is
Lewis 1986. For commentary, see Divers 2002 and Melia 2003; see also
the entries on
David Lewis's metaphysics
and the
epistemology of modality.
And the very important topic of scientific realism has not been
touched upon. For an introductory treatment and suggestions for
further reading, see Bird 1998 Ch. 4; see also, the entries on
scientific realism
and
structural realism.
Finally, it has not been possible to include any discussion of realism
about intentionality and meaning (but see the entries on
intentionality
and
theories of meaning.)
The locus classicus in recent philosophy is Kripke 1982. For a
robustly realistic view of the intentional, see Fodor 1987. For a
collection of some of the central secondary literature, see Miller and
Wright 2002, and for a robust defence of Kripke's interpretation of
Wittgenstein, see Kusch (2006). For an entertaining defence of
metaphysical realism, see Musgrave 2001 (exercise for the reader: do
any of the forms of opposition to realism described in this entry rely
on what Musgrave calls word-magic?). For an alternative approach to
mapping the debates about realism, see Fine (2001). For good
introductory book length treatments of realism, see Kirk 1999 and
Brock and Mares 2006. Greenough and Lynch (2006) is a useful
collection of papers by many of the leading lights in the various
debates about realism.

Rosen, G., 1994. “Objectivity and Modern Idealism: What is
the Question?”, in M. Michael and J. O'Leary-Hawthorne (eds.),
Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of
Mind, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 277–319.